RFK, Jr. Has Sabotaged Early Voting in a Critical Swing State

[W. Niederhut]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has Sabotaged Early Voting in a Critical Swing State

By Mark Joseph Stern

Sept 12, 20242:24 PM

 

 

 

The North Carolina Supreme Court tossed a grenade into the state’s election on Monday, violating both state and federal law to grant Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cynical, last-minute removal from the ballot. Its 4–3 decision will compel election administrators to destroy nearly 3 million already-printed ballots that featured Kennedy’s name and redesign 2,348 different ballot styles across the state to accommodate the eleventh-hour change. This complex process will significantly delay the distribution of new ballots—which will, in turn, unlawfully abridge early voting for everyone while jeopardizing the voting rights of service members overseas in clear contradiction of federal statute. It’s a nightmare for local election officials, who must now disregard the laws they’re sworn to uphold. And it’s an affront to North Carolinians at large, whose right to a fair, orderly election has been sabotaged by a lawless court and the candidate it so obviously favors.

 

Kennedy v. North Carolina State Board of Elections, Monday’s decision, is exactly what you’d expect from a court controlled by elected Republican justices. The facts are damning: After running for months as a third-party candidate, RFK Jr. “suspended” his campaign and endorsed Trump on Aug. 23. Kennedy then sought to selectively remove his name from the ballot, but only in swing states where it might help Trump. By the time Kennedy dropped out, the North Carolina State Board of Elections had informed candidates and parties that the deadline for replacing nominees would be Aug. 22.

Kennedy did not file his request for removal until Aug. 27, five days after the deadline and four days after he withdrew. By that point, county election boards were already printing ballots. Under state law, the board of elections may refuse a “late” request to remove a candidate from the ballot when removal is no longer “practical.” Another state law compels election officials to mail ballots to service members and others living overseas by Sept. 6. North Carolina’s state elections director testified that redesigning the ballot would take 18 to 23 days. So removing Kennedy’s name from the ballot—then designing and printing substitutes—would require election officials to violate state law. Even if these officials had begun removing Kennedy’s name the moment that he suspended his campaign, they could not have met the legal deadline.

 

 

Yet the North Carolina Supreme Court still sided with Kennedy. A bare majority ordered election officials to work around the clock to destroy 3 million ballots, redesign new ones for every locality, and mail them out as quickly as possible. The work and the cost of this undertaking falls primarily on badly underfunded county boards of elections. Monday’s decision also forces the board to shorten the early voting period, which was required by law to begin on Sept. 6. And the ruling may also push the state into a violation of federal law, which orders states to send absentee ballots overseas by Sept. 21. North Carolina election officials have warned the court that removing Kennedy may make it impossible to mail ballots by that date. It’s no exaggeration to say that the state Supreme Court is nullifying federal voting rights.

Why? Republican Justice Trey Allen’s opinion for the court accused the board of elections of misconduct, suggesting that it rushed to print ballots featuring RFK Jr. so he could not remove his name in time. This baseless accusation rests on the fact that the board did not stop printing ballots the moment that Kennedy announced his withdrawal—even though he did not say whether he’d withdraw from North Carolina in that speech, and did not file for removal in the state for five more days. Allen smeared election officials as lacking “clean hands,” maligning them for the crime of following the law as written.

 

In search of a legal justification, Allen cited the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantee that “all elections shall be free.” Keeping Kennedy on the ballot after his withdrawal, the justice wrote, would infringe upon this “fundamental” and “exclusive right” by denying them “accurate information regarding the candidates.” What’s most preposterous about this logic is that Allen and his conservative colleagues have gutted this very right at every opportunity. As soon as conservative justices flipped the court in 2023, they overturned precedents protecting citizens’ ability to participate in “free elections.” Most notoriously, they reversed several landmark rulings that limited partisan redistricting, giving the GOP-dominated Legislature carte blanche to gerrymander Democrats into a permanent minority. In the process, these justices dismissed the guarantee of “free elections” as little more than an aspirational statement of principle.

 

 

Now, in an about-face, the conservative justices have turbocharged the free elections clause—but only to reward RFK Jr.’s gamesmanship on Trump’s behalf. Evidently, this clause is so meaningless that it does not limit the Legislature’s authority to punish citizens for voting Democratic by denying them fair representation. At the same time, it is somehow so powerful that it compels courts throw elections into chaos and uncertainty, in violation of state and federal law, to benefit a candidate who broke the rules.

What happens next? The elections board is desperately racing to design and print ballots to meet the federal deadline, but it may not succeed. Voters both stateside and abroad face a denial of their right, secured by state and federal statute, to vote early. “The whims of one man,” as Justice Allison Riggs warned in dissent, “have been elevated above the constitutional interests of tens of thousands of North Carolina voters.” Indeed, Monday’s decision substantially shortens the early voting period of all North Carolinians, and threatens the ability of service members stationed overseas to receive and return their ballot in time for the election. Voters who requested an absentee ballot were, by law, entitled to get them mailed out by Sept. 6. Now these ballots cannot be mailed out for weeks. The ruling was so destabilizing that even Justice Richard Dietz, a conservative, felt moved to dissent, faulting the majority for failing “to follow the law as it is written.”

It was Riggs, though—joined by the court’s one other liberal, Justice Anita Earls—who laid bare the shameless partisan hackery on display. “Today, any public aspersions cast on the impartiality, independence, and dignity of our state courts are well-earned,” she wrote in her dissent, decrying “the magnitude of the harm” inflicted as “egregious and unjustified.”

 

 

 

It’s telling that Riggs took the unusual step of inviting the public to condemn not just the majority’s decision, but its integrity as a judicial body. North Carolina’s justices are elected, and Riggs is running on November’s ballot for an eight-year term against Republican Jefferson Griffin. Over the past four years, Republicans flipped four seats on the court, consigning Democrats to a 5–2 minority. If Griffin unseats Riggs, then Earls will be the last remaining liberal. It would take decades to shift the court anywhere near the center, let alone flip it to the left. All the while, a far-right supermajority would run roughshod over North Carolinians’ rights and continually interfere in elections to benefit Republicans.

That, of course, is what’s going on here. North Carolina is hugely competitive; polls indicate that Trump and Kamala Harris are effectively tied. Harris’ first two rallies after Tuesday’s debate will be held in the state, a sign of its extraordinary importance. As a candidate, RFK Jr. appeared to siphon more votes from Trump than from his Democratic opponent. He is removing himself from the ballot in swing states because he fears his supporters will vote for him if his name appears, and vote for Trump if it does not. And because he waited until the last minute, early voters—who skew Democratic in the state—will be denied their ballots on time. Now the North Carolina Supreme Court is breaking the law to abet Kennedy’s efforts on Trump’s behalf. If the state’s voters are sick of political chaos infecting their judiciary, Riggs’ election gives them an opportunity to fight back—if election officials can still get their ballots out in time.

North Carolina campaign: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sabotaged early voting. (slate.com)

Edited October 1 by W. Niederhut

[W. Niederhut]

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has a New Plan to Paralyze the Vote Count in a Critical Swing State

Last edited Tue Sep 24, 2024, 07:19 PM 

(Slate) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking increasingly bizarre and contradictory positions in his ongoing crusade to inject pandemonium into the 2024 election. Right now the former third-party candidate is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to restore his name to the ballot in New York, asserting a constitutional right to run for president in the state. At the same time, he is asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to remove his name from the ballot in that state, asserting a constitutional right not to run there. Moreover, because it is too late to print new ballots in Wisconsin, Kennedy is demanding that clerks manually place stickers over his name on some 4 million existing ballots. Election officials say this untested improvisation could jam up voting tabulators, making it impossible to scan ballots in a key swing state on Election Day and requiring a drawn-out hand count instead.

That may well be the point: Kennedy’s tactics reflect an evident desire to sabotage the efficient administration of the election and undermine trust in its outcome. He appears eager to aid Republican candidate Donald Trump by acting not as a surrogate but as a chaos agent, sowing confusion and doubt at every turn.

At this point, RFK Jr. is running Schrödinger’s campaign, simultaneously seeking and disavowing the presidency in different states. After striving to get his name on the ballot in as many places as possible, Kennedy suspended his third-party run last month, endorsing Trump over Kamala Harris. The former candidate is now trying to take his name off the ballot in battleground states for fear that he might siphon off votes from Trump. Yet he is still fighting to keep his name on the ballot in other states, including New York. It is not entirely clear why Kennedy cares about staying on the ballot anywhere; his overall strategy, however, reflects an intent to destabilize the election and abridge the early voting period, as he did in North Carolina. 

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/robert-kennedy-jr-wisconsin-vote-sticker-trump.html

[Matt Allison]

17 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Kennedy’s tactics reflect an evident desire to sabotage the efficient administration of the election and undermine trust in its outcome. He appears eager to aid Republican candidate Donald Trump by acting not as a surrogate but as a chaos agent, sowing confusion and doubt at every turn.

People are predisposed to holding the Kennedys in high regard, and with very good reason: there is a long record of unselfish service to our country. But it's a big family and sometimes there are bad apples in the bunch. As pleasant as RFK Jr. can be in personal interactions, his general behavior is that of a bad person. And only he is to blame for that.

[W. Niederhut]

23 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

People are predisposed to holding the Kennedys in high regard, and with very good reason: there is a long record of unselfish service to our country. But it's a big family and sometimes there are bad apples in the bunch. 

And, sticking with your metaphor, Matt, some apples are bad as a result of being eaten by worms. 🤥

[W. Niederhut]

RFK Jr. to stay on Wisconsin presidential ballot in his latest legal loss

The defeat came the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Kennedy's bid to be on the ballot in New York.

 

 

Sept. 30, 2024, 12:32 PM MDT

By Jordan Rubin

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was able to get off the ballot in North Carolina, but he has now failed to do so in another battleground state: Wisconsin. The rejection from the latter state’s top court came the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Kennedy’s bid to be on the ballot in New York.

Michigan’s top court earlier this month likewise said he’ll be on the swing state’s ballot.

These rulings follow the suspension of Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign last month and his endorsement of Republican nominee Donald Trump. Since dropping out of the race, he has fought to stay off the ballot in swing states, where he could hurt Trump, while trying to get on them elsewhere, such as New York in the attempt that failed Friday.

The Wisconsin rejection also came Friday. Upholding a lower court’s ruling against Kennedy, the state's top court noted that the lower court had “pointed to the fact Kennedy had simultaneously claimed harm in some states from not being removed from the ballot and harm in other states from not being placed on the ballot.” The court also cited

... the harm that would be inflicted on the public if the requested injunction were granted, including the high cost of reprinting ballots or the logistical problems in conducting an election with ballots on which stickers were placed to obscure Kennedy’s name, as he requested.”

 

The Wisconsin high court also called out the quality of Kennedy’s lawyering, writing that his briefs failed to develop arguments “to even a minimal standard sufficient for us to consider their merits.” While emphasizing that it wasn’t necessarily in agreement with the lower court’s legal conclusions, the top court said it was simply “unable to make such determinations, given the inadequate briefing presented to us.” 

 

 

 

Edited October 1 by W. Niederhut